Despite adopting digital cameras in the late 90’s, I managed to lose my pre-2003 library somewhere along the way (hence my quintuple backups, including online and offsite copies). That said, I have over 15,000 digital pictures in my iPhoto library, and average 300 or so new images per month, not to mention the videos stored along side them. At this point, the library is so large it’s right on the edge of being completely unusable.
Scrolling through images? Useless. Manually creating albums? If I don’t do it as I sync the camera, it never happens. Events? Nearly worthless. Browsing through photos on my Xbox? Actually impossible. About all I know is I DO have safe backups, and if I’m willing to scroll enough, the photos are all there to view, print, etc. Which I basically never do.
Further, the actual size of my library is now so big (125gb) I had to move it to a USB drive. And as cameras continue to improve, or as people adopt more DSLRs and video recording devices, collection sizes will grow out of manageable sizes.
And this is a problem that actually notably worsens every month.
So what’s to be done about it? Here’s what I propose:
1) Photo management tools must become capable of comprehending multiple file storage locations.
A user should be able to divvy up their collection across local, USB, and networked drives, and have clear comprehension of how to manage this. Maybe I keep my “recent” and “favorites” on the laptop, the “last year” on a USBdrive, and all the rest on a networked drive (or secondary USB drive, or both). Further, this must be implemented in such a way that a user can easily figure out where stuff is, in a non-technical fashion.
2) Photo tools must have independent, intelligent, automatic, redundant backup services
There are no files I have that are more important to me than my pictures. In fact, my photos become *more* important over time, and as the collections grow, *more* likely to have problems (data corruption, loss, etc). Backup should not be an afterthought, it should be a required element of the environment – plus it’s a great upsell opportunity for virtually all involved providers. On a related note, the management tools should effectively inventory my entire collection, and warn me if any given subset is at risk.
3) The introduction of new photo organization paradigms
While all the apps do effectively decent jobs at creating events, albums, albums within albums, folders, timelines, tags, favorites, and more, it’s simply not enough. Which makes sense, given that in all reality, this is a problem the photo world hasn’t really faced before for typical users. In the past, the only people with tens of thousands of photos were professional photographers, who never really need to manage or even access all of them simultaneously. The digital photo management world is only slightly more powerful than print photo albums and shoeboxes full of pictures. We need new concepts in how we’ll organize pictures (and incidentally, making users tag them, is not the answer). I’m personally still noodling on the concept, and have yet to come up with something – but I trust there are better data/knowledge management folks out there than myself.
4) Video must become a side-by-side feature to photo management
Whether it’s video capture built into a digital camera or a standalone device like a Flip, users are increasingly creating video libraries. And much like our photo libraries, the files are disorganized, not easily searchable, and have no strong mechanisms for organization beyond simple file/folder/date concepts. Since there’s a high likelihood of people creating even more videos in the future than they do today, this problem must be addressed in parallel to the photo one.
There it is, my “manifesto” for personal photo management software. Looking forward to seeing the future of iPhoto, Picasa, and other mainstream tools for what is clearly an impending mainstream problem!
Lightroom does just about everything you mentioned. I will demo for you tomorrow.
Does light room also allow you to have multiple photo sets in multiple locations?
I have sets prior to 2007, 2007-2009, and 2010… precious baby pix.
Eric
Do you really have all those pics in one folder? I divide mine into folders for each year. That at least helps some.
The storage problem, at least on site, hasn’t become a problem due to cheap HDDs. Same with off site. I can make a backup on a portable drive and leave it at work.
I do agree with your other points about photo/video management.
Wonder how many files we’ll have in another 5-10 years. Then at some point we have to turn all that stuff over to the kids and then it’s their problem.
As a father with 12k photos myself, I couldn’t agree more. The one thing I will add is how frustrating it was to upgrade to the iPhone 4 since I had to wait 90 minutes for it to “re-optimize” my 12k photos. At the same time though, it is pretty awesome to have every single digital photo I’ve ever taken in my pocket at all times.
Aren’t you essentially talking about Aperture 3? The multi-storage device request is handled by Aperture’s “Library Chooser” …. Aperture supports video libraries easily. For backup, you should be using BackBlaze for this. It’s set-it-and-forget-it easy, and dirt cheap.
yeah, I was just going to say lightroom will do a lot of this, but for a general user it is both expensive and has a relatively STEEP learning curve compared to the iphoto solution that many have. taking about 10K “snaps” a year, I find I really have to cull them when I TRANSFER them, making it pretty easy to get the actual numbers down and the actual VALUE up. I also categorize in “albums” based on three criteria.
Would I PRINT this? I don’t have to print it, but it is print quality. These make for the best slideshows. This stays local most of the time, but of course gets backed up.
Would I want to LOOK/SHOW this. Maybe the lighting isn’t right, or the subject isn’t in the perfect position but it SHOWS something that I want to have in my slideshows. Stays local, gets backed up
Is there something in the picture, not included in the two above categories, that I need to SAVE? Scores from a game, a sign in a foreign land, who was at a meeting, or some form of content that I could leverage across another picture. A bridge shot where I don’t want ALL the people on it, but I’m going to ADD some specific people, etc. This stuff moves straight to an external drive.
There ARE some third party tools/applications that let one do a similar type of multi-library plan with iphoto, just don’t know the name off hand.
As a few have already mentioned, there are tools that do everything you have requested above (I personally use Lightroom), they are just not mainstream and will never be comparable to iPhoto.
You do have a good point on photo organization and the need for something new. However, we are so wrapped up around using tags, I don’t see the photo world breaking out loose of that anytime soon.
I’d love to see another method of organization surface, but until then, my 350GB of photos (and growing) are tagged and organized with the tools LightRoom has provided me and I seem to be able to access what I need, when I need without a problem. The key is to come up with a very strict organization schema and having the ability to stick with it.
Jeremy, I have had to wrestle with a bunch of these issues doing support for my father. He is an amateur, borderline professional, who takes thousands of photos per trip, and is an incredible photographer. His trip to India netted 8000 photos in one shot (12 mp DLSR Canon shots). I thought about moving him to another program (like Aperature, which is much better designed to handle professional work (including space taken up by editing photos), but while my father is fairly tech saavy, most of the other software is pretty complex, even for very knowledgeable photo enthusiast. Instead, I kept him on what he knows well (iPhoto) but then used a program called “iPhoto Library Manager” (http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/) to create multiple iPhoto libraries and launch them when needed. We basically got this down to a procedure where each year we make a new library (and sometimes for each major trip they take). It works well and keeps photo numbers more manageable — mirrored to a separate HD for backup using Chronosync.